Cranbrook Winter openings @ Detroit Free Press

For the Cranbrook Art Museum Director Andrew Blauvelt, the suite of four new winter shows came together as part careful planning, part good luck.

“It was kind of serendipitous, but very lucky,“ said Blauvelt. The museum was developing a show around the work of New York-based graphics artist Ryan McGinness, and an exhibition about the early years of famed New York street and contemporary artist Jean-Michel Basquiat got on his radar. “I wanted to talk a little bit about ‘the street’ — not street art, necessarily, but artists that work from the studio to the street, back and forth, in a different way than we think about it today.”

Having established those pieces of the program, Blauvelt then realized it was the 30th anniversary of the museum’s project with New York pop culture and street artist Keith Haring. “I was a student here that year, so it was actually the first project I worked on for the museum,” laughed Blauvelt.